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Archive for March, 2010

As many of you know, I like to do remodeling projects on my home. Last year, I had remodeled two of our bathrooms and this year, I put in a new front door.

Most recently, I just completed laying a stone tile facade over existing brick in front of my house.

The brick was in good shape but I just didn’t care for the brick look. Here’s how it looked before:

Brick face in front of the house

In addition to the two brick columns bordering the garage, I had a half wall of brick next to our front door.

Brick next to front door

So I purchased some thin stone veneer from RealStone Systems. Most of the pieces I ordered were corner units, as I had a lot of corners to cover. This stone veneer comes in 6″ x 24″ flat tiles and cost a little over $6 per square foot. Corners come in two pieces.

The tiles are over an inch thick, so I rented a large wet tile saw at the local Home Depot ($55/day) and bought 360 pounds of type-S mortar. (I also tweaked my back a bit lifting those 80 lb. bags.) What’s nice about these tiles is that you can apply them straight onto the brick. No scratch coat required. But with all the corners, there was a lot of cutting.

Here’s how it turned out. It took me and another helper two full days to complete the job.

Stone veneer next to the door

New stone columns

Stone close up

While there’s no grouting necessary, we did apply a bit of extra mortar to cover any gaps or large seams. One tip: make sure to keep a wet sponge handy as you apply the stone to wipe off any excess mortar. Once that stuff dries, it takes a lot more work to scrub it off the tile.

How much did this cost? Stone was a bit over $1,000 delivered + labor + tile saw + mortar = $1,500.